Longing and Desire

Westminster’s Schubert recital celebrates the Bohemian lifestyle of the pre-eminent art song composer.

By: Ilene Dube
   It was nearly 40 years ago that Lindsay Christiansen, an acclaimed lieder singer, began her lifelong love affair with Franz Schubert (1797-1828).
   As an undergraduate organ major at the University of Virginia in Richmond, she heard a recital of Die Schöne Muller song cycle given by her choral conductor.
   "I had never heard anything like it," says Ms. Christiansen from her Westminster Choir College office in Princeton, where she chairs the voice department. "Another song, ‘Viola,’ was so touching — the words are so silly, about flowers talking to each other — but something about its simplicity reached something complex in me."
   Mezzo-soprano Lindsay Christiansen and pianist James Goldsworthy will perform three sets of Schubert’s songs Sept. 23 at Westminster’s Bristol Chapel. Dr. Goldsworthy, associate dean at Westminster, has performed throughout the world and premiered works by Milton Babbitt, among others.
   Wearing a silky black dress with cabbage-size red flowers, Ms. Christiansen talks rapidly in carefully enunciated words. After earning a master’s degree in organ at the University of Illinois, then realizing her true calling and pursuing a master’s in voice, she received a Rotary Foundation scholarship to study lieder in Germany.
   Lieder are German art songs using poetry of the 18th and 19th centuries, in which the composer portrays the imagery and moods of the text. Schubert, who died of venereal disease at 31, is among the pre-eminent lieder composers.
   While living with a German family, Ms. Christiansen learned to speak and sing in German and Italian. She met her husband, a German, at that time. Over the years, she has been artist-in-residence for voice study at the Franz Schubert Institut in Baden bei Wien, Austria, just outside Vienna. "It is an amazing gathering of young singers," says the Princeton resident. Students spend 12 hours a day for six weeks intensely studying German poetry, its meaning and symbolism.
   In 1995, Ms. Christiansen organized and coordinated a Schubert festival at Westminster. The one-week program included master classes and lectures with historians, political scientists, sociologists and musicologists. Attendees came from all over the country, with concerts held every night and choral pieces conducted by Joseph Flummerfelt.
   During a sabbatical, while reading and thinking about her favorite composer, Ms. Christiansen wrote a paper on the political meaning of Schubert’s songs and presented it to the Northeast Modern Language Association. "Schubert’s music exhibits an ambiguity of spirit and style that reflects his Biedermeier world of political repression and hardship," says Ms. Christiansen. Biedermeier (1815-1869) was a style of music, painting, sculpture, literature and design in Germany and Austria.
   After the French Revolution and the defeat of Napoleon, life in 1820 Vienna was repressive. The secret police, formed in 1793 to focus on political and moral crimes, suppressed any activity in Austria that smacked of liberalism and kept an especially close eye on artists and intellectuals. Official censors banned literature deemed controversial.
   As an active member of a circle of students, poets, writers and artists who gathered at inns and in each other’s living quarters to read and discuss literature and politics, Schubert was at the center of this repressive atmosphere. The group was especially interested in the German poetry censored by government bureaucrats.
   In an attempt to make its ideas better understood, the group published a journal, Beyträge zur Bildung für Jünglinge, but after two editions it was banned; existing copies were removed from bookstore shelves.
   In 1818, Schubert left home to live with Johann Mayrhofer, a poet and member of the group. Schubert also left the security of a teaching job to attempt to earn a living as a composer. In 1820, Schubert was arrested, along with Johann Senn, a poet, member of the group and good friend. Senn was imprisoned for 14 months, then exiled from Vienna and never seen again by Schubert, who was released and reprimanded for "impertinent and opprobrious language," according to Ms. Christiansen.
   The incident had a major impact on Schubert’s work. In the last six years of his life, Schubert was seriously ill, yet full of creative energy. During this period he wrote the Winterriese cycle, known for its emotional complexity and spiritual depths, as well as songs based on texts by Friedrich Schlegel. The Schlegel poems "delight in the freedom of spirit possible in nature," says Ms. Christiansen. "Schubert’s settings intensify that freedom and imply the power of the artist to deflect, if not overcome, the forces against him by a retreat to a romantic world removed from the real world to whose authority he refuses to submit. All are in sharp, major keys which elicit a brilliant sound."
   Mayrhofer’s poetry became a focus of Schubert’s work. The poet was a liberal thinker who was forced to earn a living in the censor’s office. "He found the world an inhospitable place and death the longed-for and comforting release from life’s torment. His poems reflect the melancholia that was his constant companion, and are permeated with sehnsucht (longing)," says Ms. Christiansen. Mayrhofer was perhaps the most important influence on Schubert’s song writing between 1816-1818. The poet took his life, after three attempts, in 1836.
   Schubert set more of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poetry than any other poet. These include simple strophic songs, in which the music is repeated for each verse, to complex, dramatic ballads and odes. "A sense of longing, of unfulfillment, pervades the whole period, but there is also a sense of resignation in Schubert," says Ms. Christiansen. "I almost called this recital, ‘Sweet Longing and Resignation.’ There is also a glimmer, a sweet side of life, but always a slight melancholy, a nostalgia."
Music of Franz Schubert will be performed by mezzo-soprano Lindsay Christiansen and pianist James Goldsworthy at Westminster Choir College Bristol Chapel, Hamilton Avenue and Walnut Lane, Princeton, Sept. 23, 4 p.m. The recital will include songs from Schubert’s final years, and songs on texts by Mayrhofer and Goethe. Dr. Goldsworthy will be joined by violinist Renee Jolles and cellist Maxine Neuman to perform Schubert’s Piano Trio in B-Flat Op. 99 D989. Tickets cost $10 adults, $8 students/ seniors. For information, call (609) 219-2001.